Allspace in a Notshall

Found this very informative article on Disinfo.com, discussing the effect that TV + propaganda has had on the psychology of America and the rest of the world:

It is expected that Americans will consistently prescribe to the doctrine of the television. It is subtly communicated that one should stay within the collective and never challenge the message, for doing so may be considered an aggression towards culture. The message is, “Be a good consumer; always obey authority; you know nothing; listen only to experts; be content and never question or express new ideas.” This signal is being broadcast across millions of screens, indoctrinating the unconscious minds of those who choose this as their only reality. Self-censorship occurs when these individuals become so deeply indoctrinated that they are afraid to discuss any information outside the paradigm of television-created culture; they police their thoughts to ensure they won’t conflict with this culture. Sadly, many people’s reality today does not allow any outside information to process, instead it is written off as conspiracy or blatant lies. Our consciousness has been destroyed so much that fiction has become reality. An entire lifestyle of poisonous foods, pharmaceuticals, and fluoridated water are accepted as safe and sold to us at the cost of our health and well being.

Crisis’ are created on a daily basis and broadcast across the airwaves to keep individuals in a state of panic and fear. Whether it be the threat of a pandemic or terrorism, the constant state of crisis has created a form of mental illness as we are slowly acclimated into an age of crisis. By using Hegelian dialectic, the television promotes the problem, guides our reaction, and presents the solution. The problem of terrorism was exclaimed, a strong emotional response was evoked, and it was stated that our rights need be sacrificed in order to protect us from the threat. We’ve lost personal sovereignty under the guise of terrorism; we’re stopped and searched; we’re watched by cameras as we go about our lives; and we’re encouraged to spy on our neighbors. We have been trained to accept the life of a prisoner.

Read the rest here.

Forget about a dirty or nuclear bomb or another 9/11. This is what we should really be worried about, Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.

Click the link above to read the entire article, if you dare.

This is what I feel will lead to what everyone currently refers to as a zombie apocalypse.  But in this case, it’d be entirely real, and not that the zombies would be the undead, but rather just humans who have lived their entire lives in cities with power and electricity 24/7.  Now cut them off from it and you’ll see “society” and “civilization” quickly dissolve into every disaster movie you’ve ever seen or any post-apocalyptic book you’ve ever read.

Forget about terrorism, flying planes into buildings, blowing up planes, etc.  Start worrying about a world-wide blackout.

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I just found a fascinating article while browsing LiveScience.com: Slime Mold Beats Humans at Perfecting Traffic Networks

The scientists let the mold organize itself and spread out around these nutrients, and found that it built a pattern very similar to the real-world train system connecting those cities around Tokyo. And in some ways, the amoeba solution was more efficient. What’s more, the slime mold built its network without a control center that could oversee and direct the whole enterprise; rather, it reinforced routes that were working, and eliminated redundant channels, constantly adapting and adjusting for maximum efficiency.

“The model captures the basic dynamics of network adaptability through interaction of local rules, and produces networks with properties comparable to or better than those of real-world infrastructure networks,” Wolfgang Marwan of Otto von Guericke University in Germany, who was not involved in the project, wrote in an accompanying essay in the same issue of Science.

Has everything already been done before?

I came across an article in The Washington Post this evening regarding technology, its role in our lives and what it’s doing to us and where it’s leading us.  It’s very short but brings up some valid observations.

Technology has drawn us into our interconnected webs, in the office, on the street, on the park bench, to the point that we exist virtually everywhere except in the physical world. Robert Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, laments that when students pass through the school’s visually stimulating campus, iPhones, BlackBerrys and all the evolving devices and apps draw them into their blinkered personal realms. “Most of the groves, courtyards, gardens, fountains, artworks, open spaces and architectural complexes have disappeared behind a cloaking device, it would seem,” he writes in his book “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.”

Actually, we have become symbionts, says Katherine Hayles, author of “How We Became Posthuman.” Just as a lichen is the marriage of a fungus and an algae, we now live in full partnership with digital technology, which we rely on for the infrastructure of our lives. “If every computer were to crash tomorrow, it would be catastrophic,” she says. “Millions or billions of people would die. That’s the condition of being a symbiont.”

Hayles is among a number of intellectuals who see this dependence as not necessarily bad, but as advancing civilization and, above all, just inevitable. “From Thoreau on, we have had this dream we can withdraw from our technologies and live closer to the natural world, and yet that’s not the cultural trajectory that we have followed,” says Hayles, a professor of literature at Duke University. “You could say when humans started to walk upright, we lost touch with the natural world. We lost an olfactory sense of the world, but obviously bipedalism paid big dividends.”

She argues that this has actually made us more aware of our surroundings because so many devices are driven by their location and the user’s awareness of place. “The BlackBerry might be looking for a local restaurant and a person two blocks away, not overseas. If you’re walking downtown and you can access information that’s been tagged there, that information suddenly becomes part of that location.”

You can read the entire article here.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially the last quote; about how you can access information about a piece of space you’re physically residing in at the moment.  It’s called augmented reality and will quickly become ubiquitous, probably in less than five years would be my guess.  Make sure to click that link to the Wikipedia article about it.  You can also read about what Google is doing with their new service Google Goggles.

Do I feel disconnected from nature as this article seems to suggest?  Not at all.  Because I ask myself, frequently, what is nature?  Aren’t we humans a part of nature, no matter what we do, what we create and what we ultimately evolve to?  Is an urban concrete jungle a part of nature?  Yes.  It is, but it’s humanity’s addition to nature.

I don’t believe that we need to reconnect with nature in anyway.  I think that with technology, we are connecting to nature in a way that has never been done before.  Technology itself is neutral.  Technology is not the question here, it’s how we’re using these tools that’s the question.  Technology is just the extension of our senses and that’s the scary part.  We are augmenting our nervous systems and ultimately our bodies.

I think that this evolutionary path of complete technological integration is unavoidable, of course, but I also believe that everything is on track, according to some predetermined or destined goal, but I come to a dead stop when I try to think of what this end goal is.  It could be a myriad of things but I, for one, cannot wait to find out what it is and am also ecstatic to be alive at a time like this.

Found this very interesting article talking about the forefront of consciousness in regards to the internet’s influence and more particularly that of the website 4chan.  Link at the end.

I’ll admit that I’m not a 4chan fanatic but I do visit there occasionally so the article intrigued me enough to spend a bit of time there.  I really like some of the things the author, Jason Louv, brings up in his article.  I’ll post some of my favorite tidbits below:

Yet what the media has failed to grasp is what 4chan can tell us about where we’re headed. The Chans aren’t the freak sideshow of the Internet. They are the heart and soul of the Internet. And they are the ones furthest ahead of the pack, leading us. At this point there should be little doubt that the Internet is mutating the human species into something completely different. Therefore it’s instructive to look at the most extreme, freebased forms of the Internet to see where we’re going — and 4chan is that freebased version of mankind’s new drug of choice.

In the last decade, we’ve seen the increasing acceleration of information (a la Terence McKenna and Moore’s law) heralded as the key to new business development, though it has, in fact, so ruined our attention spans that it is almost impossible for modern man to get any kind of productive work done. We’re too lost in the datastream, too focused on taking in new information to complete a task that takes more than a few minutes, at best. I think a direct correlation can be made, for instance, between the rise of social media and the fall of the economy. The kaleidoscope of the Internet is more endless, more distracting and more mutating than even the most potent psychedelic drugs could have ever prepared us for. And 4chan is the ultimate, final trip.

What is happening here? The escape from the constraints of the flesh? The escape from the constraints of being human? The inevitable purge following the collective unconscious’ information binge? With the Internet we can now erase space and time, erase the restraints placed on the mind by matter. But what for? Once mankind set sail to explore the limits of the human world and to discover the frontiers of the planet. And once mankind plunged into himself to discover the limits, or lack thereof, of his own nature, through inner experience. But this is a new world, one bereft of the luxury of such meaningful activities. And in this new climate, the collective entity known as Anonymous has found a new frontier, and set out to discover the limits of boredom itself, mining the darkness for glittering jewels to bring back to the rest of us.

The thing that I don’t agree with is here is Louv’s assumption that our attention spans are being wiped out. I’d prefer it if he said that our attention spans are changing into something else. My attention span has not withered at all; only now it’s more fine-tuned to move from bits of information to bits of information. The idea for me is to make the conscious decision to engage my entire attention span at my choosing.

I can scan Google Reader headlines at an alarmingly rapid pace, but as soon as I come across an article I feel I should read, it’s just a simple shift in attention span to focus on a single article. I can then switch back to headline mode at ease. This is where I think we’re headed: the rapid ability to process huge amounts of information in order to find the relevant information to us at once.  This is the new evolution we’re currently involved in.  Some people are calling this dumbing-down?  Hardly.  There’s simply way too much information at our disposal to be considered dumbed-down.

Read the article “Lost in the Filth Simalacrum”.